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The Water Giver Joan Ryan, Simon & Schuster (page 3 of 4) Page 3 of 4

“Sweetie, you’re going to be fine,” I said.

Minutes later, Dr. Nguyen reappeared. He needed to talk to us again. We stepped outside. He said he had not seen the full set of X-rays. Ryan’s CT scan was on the screen. He pointed to the same white splotch the ER doc had shown us.

It was a significant bleed. The pool of blood was pressing on Ryan’s brain. Dr. Nguyen explained the specifics. I remember none of them. I remember only that he delivered the diagnosis in a way that left no wiggle room. Ryan needed surgery now to stop the bleeding.

A nurse handed us a clipboard. Barry and I signed the forms.

We went back to Ryan. There was a fluttering of preparation. New IVs being snapped into place. I held Ryan’s still hand. His nails were black from the garage and from putting the new bear¬ings on his skateboard. I traced his eyebrows with my finger. I lifted his hand and kissed it, then Barry did the same.

“You’re going to be fine, Bucko,” he said.

Then they wheeled him away.

I went outside to the parking lot and called my parents in Florida.

CT scan the day of Ryan’s accident, August 16, 2006. The shadow on the left side of scan — which is the right side of Ryan’s head — shows the accumulation of blood in his brain.

“Ryan had a skateboard accident and hit his head,” I said, trying to modulate my voice.

We were not a family that cried. We did our celebrating and fighting at the top of our lungs but our suffering in silence. There was an assumption that life was hard for everybody, and you soldiered on.

“I’m sure he’s going to be all right,” I said. “But he’s in surgery. Say some prayers.”

I said this out of habit. I long ago had stopped believing in prayer. Despite a childhood of Sunday masses and Saturday con¬fessions and long afternoons of catechism classes, I had come to distrust what people called faith. Maybe I had reported on too many exploitive ideologues and fanatics. Religious faith smacked of primitivism and magical thinking. I believed in facts, numbers, source materials. I believed in medical expertise, sophisticated equipment, well-tested pharmaceuticals.

Barry and I sat alone in the surgical waiting room on the second floor. I picked up People magazine. I put it back down. I couldn’t read anything. Neither could Barry. We could barely speak. This was really happening. Our son was in an operating room and a doctor was drilling into his skull.

I fished my phone out of my purse again and called Lorna. I wanted her with me.

Lorna and I had met when Ryan and her daughter, Emma, were in kindergarten together. Unlike most of the mothers waiting outside school at 2:30 every day, she looked as unpolished as I did most days, though she pulled it off better. She had a willowy build with legs like a dancer’s. She rarely bothered to put on makeup or style her hair. She generally wore running shoes, shorts, and a tank top. She usually had come from a run or a hike, or from her art studio, and she still had paint or cement under her fingernails. No tennis skirts. No kitty heels. No scarves. She didn’t try to put up a good front. When Emma wailed and carried on almost every morning of kindergarten, distraught that her mother was leaving, Lorna shrugged and smiled.

“I’m so proud,” she’d joke.

We got to know each other through a Thursday morning hiking group. As a newspaper columnist, my schedule was flexible enough to escape into the hills near my house once or twice a week. Lorna and I would end up talking for two hours straight, barely noticing the other twenty women navigating the trail with us. Lorna was a sculptor who usually had several projects going at once, fitting her work time around her kids’ schedules. She had grown up in Wellesley, Massachusetts, met her husband at Union College in New York, then earned a master’s in fine arts at Columbia. She taught art for years, several in Harlem. She moved to Northern California when her husband, Doug, took a job with an investment banking company in San Francisco.

Lorna and Doug lived a few blocks away from Barry and me, so their family and ours fell into the habit of having dinner together at least once a week, usually twice and sometimes three times. We would run into each other at the corner grocery and end up at one house or the other, grilling chicken and tossing Caesar salads. Doug and Barry were both passionate cooks and went to elaborate lengths to prepare exquisite dinners on the weekends, shopping at the farmers’ market, marinating, chopping, seasoning, braising. At our Christmas Eve gift exchange every year, the two men bought each other cookbooks.

Both men traveled frequently: Doug to visit companies in which he had invested, Barry to sporting events across the coun¬try. The downside to working as a sportscaster was being away from home several nights a week, though Barry’s schedule had improved in recent years. He left ESPN to work for Fox because Fox assigned him to Pac-10 football and basketball, which meant most of his trips were short flights to West Coast cities.

When our husbands were away, Lorna and I and our kids got together for simple, communal meals of store-bought roasted chicken and maybe some cheese and crackers. And always a bottle of wine. Emma and her older brother, Ben, became like cousins to Ryan. Our two families traveled together to Kenya one year, to Tahiti another. Lorna and I took a trip on our own to Ireland to visit a friend whose husband was shooting a movie on location there. Lorna and Doug owned a condo at the edge of the ski resort at Squaw Valley near Lake Tahoe, and the place became some¬thing of a second home for us, too. Barry and I didn’t ski, but Ryan was crazy for snowboarding.

In the surgical waiting room that night, I dialed Lorna’s number.

“I’ll be right there,” she said.

She, Doug, and Emma arrived minutes later. Ben was away at college. Lorna wrapped her arm around my shoulder and I leaned into her. “He’s going to be fine,” she said. Then, in her practical Lorna way, she called a good friend who is a doctor in San Francisco and took notes about what questions to ask the neurosurgeon.

The surgery took about an hour. Dr. Nguyen said he had re¬moved a silver-dollar-sized portion of Ryan’s skull, then suctioned and scraped out the accumulated blood, which was described later to me as like hard Welch’s grape jelly. He reattached the disc of bone with titanium rivets.

From THE WATER GIVER by Joan Ryan. Copyright © 2009 by Joan Ryan. Reprinted with permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. www.simonandschuster.com. For more information on Joan Ryan, go to www.joanryanink.com.

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